1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the field of information systems. More specifically, the present invention relates to the creation and maintenance of a scrapbook of information pages.
2. Background Information
With advances in computer, networking and telecommunication technologies, increasingly computers are being networked together. Information have become readily available with a few mouse clicks, from private data servers within an enterprise network to public data servers in public data networks, such as the world wide web (also referred to as web servers or web sites) accessible through the Internet.
Under the prior art, most browsers offer assistance to the user in keeping track the various sites he has visited, bookmarking his favorite sites and so forth. However, as far as saving and collecting a xe2x80x9cscrapbookxe2x80x9d of his favorite information pages, only the conventional xe2x80x9csavexe2x80x9d function, which requires more than one mouse click, is available to the user. Additionally, an information page must be downloaded before it can be saved, consuming the valuable and often limited communication bandwidth of the client. Furthermore, no assistance is offered on organizing the saved pages.
Today, many portals (such as Yahoo, Hotmail, and so forth) offer the service of emailing a user a list of annotated links in accordance with a set of preferences indicated by the user. However, these services typically suffer from the disadvantage that the user may choose from a limited set of categories offered by the service (such as news, sports and so forth). Moreover, each list is supplier or site bounded (e.g. a list from MSNBC, a list from Wired Magazine, and so forth). The linked documents or pages must be retrieved from their sources at the time the user wants to read them. Pre-fetching these documents or pages are not possible. A user may save these emails or even organize them by their senders (MSNBC and so forth), but there is no mechanism to organize them by topics across providers (such as all the sport items from MSNBC and CNN).
Thus, an improved approach to creating and maintain a scrapbook of information page is desired.
In accordance with a first aspect of the present invention, a xe2x80x9csave statexe2x80x9d icon having a plurality of manifestations corresponding to a plurality of states associated with saving a copy of a current information page being browsed is automatically displayed for a user. The xe2x80x9csave statexe2x80x9d icon denotes to the user whether the information page or other variants have been previously saved.
In accordance with another aspect, a xe2x80x9csingle click savexe2x80x9d icon is employed to facilitate saving a copy of the current information page being browsed for a user. The saving is accomplished without requiring further interaction with the user.
In accordance with yet another aspect, a xe2x80x9cremote savexe2x80x9d mechanism is provided to facilitate automatic retrieval of one or more information pages in accordance with one or more specified user conditions, and saving of the retrieved information pages in a remote repository. The information pages are retrieved and saved without requiring them to be first downloaded to the user""s system.
Selected ones of these and other features are provided to different embodiments to enhance a user""s ability to create and maintain a scrapbook of information pages that are of interest the user.